I'm a big user of the View Active Topics function. It's very useful for checking an entire group of forums at once, which is how I usually read the ES forums because none of the individual subforums are very large yet.

However, the forum software currently defaults to only showing the past seven days' worth of topics. Whenever I use it, I find myself having to set it back to a month or two months.

I suggest altering the length of time that the View Active Topics function goes back. I leave the exact length up to the administrators and the rest of the community, but offer my opinion of around one or two months. Specifically, I think it should be set to the oldest thread age that would be acceptable to bump back up to the top of the forum. I don't remember if there are policies about thread age here, but that's the guideline I offer.

This looks sensible to me, but it's not obvious that the default time is a knob that we admins can turn. Viking, ol' buddy ol' pal, do you see a way to make a change there from the admin controls that I'm missing?

I had seen it, but was kind of waiting for a seconding, just because altering this will affect everyone's use of the active topics page.

That said, I don't see any issue with the idea, however I am having some minor troubles implementing it. I've currently got a post up on the phpbb help forums asking for assistance making this modification, but have had no takers for the last two days.

I would point out that, if you use bookmarks at all, if you change the default view to whatever you want it to be and then bookmark the new view of the page, that using that bookmark as the link back to the forums should automatically snap you into whatever view you want. I know it's a cheap workaround, but until I find the code I need to edit to change the default, it should serve your needs.

Bookmarks! Now what a grand idea that is... For some very odd reason, despite having numerous bookmarks for many other places, I never actually bothered to bookmark anything Errant Story related. Thank you for the reminder, Mr. Viking. This shall make things easier. (And I hope you have luck with the implementation.)